Quicken changes opening balance on account

GeezerGeek

Yep, this problem still has not been fixed. The opening balance on one of my Citi credit cards was changed by Quicken. The opening transaction was dated 01/03/2013 but for some unknown reason, Quicken changed it from $223.80 to $204.72, a difference of $19.08. I don't know when this happened, but I had reconciled the account on 09/10/2024 so I know that it happened after that. Previously, it had been thought that this could happen while deactivating/reactivating accounts but to the best of my knowledge, I have not done that on the Citi accounts within the last year so if the account was deactivated/reactivated, it was probably done by the Quicken server.

Since I don't know the date that the problem occurred, I don't know the version I was using when the problem occurred, however, I use Quicken daily and I update when I see that there is a new release during the daily downloads. Presently, I'm using Quicken Deluxe on Windows R59.35.

NotACPA

The change in the opening balance seems to be associated with a change in the download method (say, Direct Connect to Web Connect, etc), or resetting the account.

The issue is well known, but the root cause has yet to be identified.

BUT, to make your remediation easier, it's been suggested that once the correct OB is known, that such be saved in the Memo field of that Opening Balance transaction. That way, should the problem re-occur, at least you'll have an easy way to spot it and know what the value should be.

GeezerGeek

Yes, but as I noted, I've made no change in activating/deactivating the download in this or any of my other Citi accounts. So if there was a change in the download method, it was the Quicken download server that made the change.

I previously experienced this problem on multiple accounts back more than a year ago. Back then, I didn't know about the problem with Quicken changing the opening balance so it took me several hours before I stumbled across the cause of the problem. This time, I immediately suspected that had happened again, after I did a brief reconciling of Quicken downloaded tranactions with Citi website. Recovering the previous opening balance was easy because, in addition to archiving backups, I had previously exported all Quicken transactions to Excel. It was easier to look at the transaction history in Excel to find the opening balance than it would have been to restore a backup.

whodiini

This is what I do for all my accounts - on the memo field, for the first entry, i type in the balance. Then when there is an issue about not matching the balance after some issue, I go to the first entry and check if the balance matches the memo amount. If not, I change the first entry and that usually fixes the issue.